Marshmallow Fondant (she: Stephanie)

Hi, my name is Stephanie and I blog over at Clockwork Lemon . During the day I work as a project analyst helping companies get government money but I spend my evenings and weekends working on baking and decorating projects. I love playing with new recipes and trying different decorating techniques. I find lots of inspiration from other baking blogs and flickr groups, who needs baking classes when you can find step by step instructions for almost anything online?

I wanted to make cakes that looked professionally decorated but I didn’t like the taste of store bought fondant (or the price of it) so I started making my own fondant from marshmallows and icing sugar.

Marshmallow fondant is easy to make and pretty fun to use. You can cover cakes and cookies with it to give them a smooth professional-looking finish or you can cut out shapes and designs to decorate your icing with. Its cheaper to make your own fondant than it is to buy it pre-made plus the pre-made stuff tastes a bit like cardboard unless you are willing to pay for a very high end product.

All you need is:

This time I decided to make it with those mini fruit flavored marshmallows. I had to sort them by colour first. I figured they would add a little bit of flavor to the fondant so I wouldn’t have to add much flavoring oil.

I use gel colours to dye my fondant but regular food colouring will work too. You won’t be able to get really dark colours without making your fondant sticky, but for lighter colours you can just even it out with more icing sugar.

I also had lemon oil and coconut flavoring on hand.. oh la la the value brand (which still works fine).

 

Step One:

Take a couple of handfuls of marshmallows and put them in a microwave safe bowl. Add a couple of drops of water and toss the marshmallows in it until they are all a bit damp. If you are going to just make one colour then put the whole bag of marshmallows in the bowl and add a couple of teaspoons of water. If you’re going to put flavoring oil in, add it now and add less water

I like to make smaller batches because its easier to add the colour to the melted marshmallow than it is to work the colour into the fondant later.

Step Two:

Stick the marshmallows in the microwave for ten seconds at a time until the are puffed up and easily stir into a goo with a wooden spoon. Tip: Grease your spoon with butter, things can get a bit sticky.

Step Three:

Add food colouring to the melted marshmallows until you get the colour you want. Remember that you’re going to be adding icing sugar which will lighten the colour so make it a bit brighter than you need.

Step Four:

Start folding icing sugar into the marshmallow goo until it becomes a soft and fluffy dough. Grease your hands with a bit of butter and turn the marshmallow out onto a table sprinkled with icing sugar. Continue to knead in icing sugar until the fondant is stiff enough to roll out.

If you add too little icing sugar the fondant will be very sticky- Just add more icing sugar

If you add too much icing sugar the fondant will be very stiff and hard to roll out – knead in a little bit of butter

Fondant with the icing sugar kneaded in.

Finished fondant!

For this batch of colours I made larger batches of lighter colours and then worked some extra gel colouring into the already made fondant to make smaller batches of darker colours. The dark purple and dark green were made from the a light pink and light green.

All you need to do is knead the gel colour in.. it takes a while to get it all mixed in which is why I only do it for smaller batches.

To store your fondant wrap them in pieces of lightly greased plastic wrap and keep them either in a big ziplock bag or a tupperware container. The fondant is essentially a sugar paste (its just marshmallows and icing sugar) so it has a shelf life of three or four months. If it feels a bit stiff and hard to use after being stored for a long time you can soften it up by kneading a bit of butter in or putting in the microwave one-two seconds at a time.

Now its ready to roll out and use to decorate your cakes and cookies!